Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity

For me it was the following two comments. It just showed me this was the type of person who is obsessed with following the latest news and keeping up with all their feeds. It's an edge use-case, and not one I subscribe to (pun intended).

I combined that with my usual e-mail communications and my regular scans of Twitter in order to figure out what was going on during the day.

Twitter is basically an RSS feed, and many people even more obsessively than coffee.

Others may say that they can avoid the all-day-long RSS time suck by only opening their clients once per day, but I argue that it still piles up redundant content that you now have to waste time going through all at once.

Of course, Twitter never has redundant content or an echo-chamber effect.

There's nothing wrong with RSS - it's how you use it.

I use Google Reader, and check my feed once, and at most twice a day, not constantly.

I have set the items to collapsed form, and only read the items that are interesting, reducing the time I spent reading through everything, which is a natural filter to block out noise. This way at the end of the day, I have about three or four articles to read. RSS is useful because it lets me choose what I want to read from a ton of incoming stuff.

If you are developing an RSS reader, the intention of the app should not be to ping the user constantly, instead focus on enabling user productivity by letting him/her choose when to check the RSS feed, and optimize reading by letting the user filter through stuff easily - i.e. maximum productivity for the user.

Swapping out RSS for twitter is illogical. They are both RSS but Twitter doesn't have an unread count.

The article instead should have pointed to content browsing solutions that replicate the experience of a newspaper for quick exploration leading to deeper reading.

I'm personally torn on RSS readers. Admittedly, I'm an almost entirely unproductive person lately, so I can't claim that it's because RSS is getting in the way of other things. My chief suspicion is that as the number of subscriptions goes up, the propensity to fly through headlines rises as well, and so too does the efficiency of applying whatever criteria normally applies in choosing whether or not to read past a headline. What normally would be signal gets converted to noise because of the quantity needed to be consumed. Of course, one can always lower the number of subscriptions, but on the other hand, as one approaches lower bounds, the less sense RSS makes: one can simply and probably with more aesthetic pleasure, just make rounds to the website. Another point: there's more information and more of interest in a website than what gets printed as words in an article or in the images or whatever media that accompanies that article. And this is another suspicious element of RSS readers: they divorce content from the context in which it "originally" appears (scare quotes because of complexity). One can learn a good lot of important stuff about a content provider by looking at that provider's website, layout, design, ad priorities, etc. And not only about that provider, but about just what the hell the web looks like these days. If all I did was read via RSS, I'd probably have no clue. And more over, if all anybody ever did was read via RSS, websites themselves would be something else entirely and that something else probably wouldn't be much to look at.

So really that's two chief suspicions: one, it's hard to find an optimal number of subscriptions (or even if there is such a thing); and two, RSS annihilates the experience of everything it can't contain.

(I said I was torn, but I think I've started to convince myself that maybe I need to ditch Google Reader...)